SEC's Gensler Says There's No Love Lost If Crypto Firms Decide To Move Overseas

Gary Gensler, the chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, went guns blazing this week on cryptocurrency businesses refusing to get in line and threatening to leave the U.S. in favor of other jurisdictions amid the ongoing crackdown launched by the financial regulator.

For the SEC chairman, there is no love lost if crypto moguls move their businesses abroad since the commission's top priority is to protect investors' interests.

"We lose more if investors get harmed here," the SEC chairman said in an interview at the agency's headquarters in Washington earlier this week. "It's a basic bargain in finance: If you want to raise money from the public, disclose certain facts and figures," he added.

Over the past months following the spectacular collapse of the controversial crypto empire FTX and its affiliates, Gensler and his team aggressively investigated and pursued businesses and personalities in the cryptocurrency industry.

The SEC had proudly announced filing charges against popular personalities in the crypto space, including FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried and Terra's Do Kwon, as well as forced settlements on companies like Gemini Trust, Genesis Global Capital and Kraken for allegedly offering unregistered securities to investors.

However, Gensler thinks that despite the series of investigation and enforcement actions the financial regulator has done, it isn't much to get crypto businesses in line or at least convince them to adhere to the regulations.

According to the SEC chair who is a Democrat and was appointed as the top honcho in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) during the Obama administration, crypto businesses instead of complying with the U.S. securities laws, have deliberately refrained to do what companies would do when agencies enforce regulations, noting that the crypto space "is a field that seems to belie that in some circumstances."

Top crypto businesses like Coinbase and Ripple, through their executives, have, over the past days, called out U.S. lawmakers to create new regulations for the industry and even suggested that they would take their business elsewhere if the business environment in the country will not change.

But, Gensler is firm on his stance and reaffirmed what he said in the past about the majority of crypto businesses operating outside of law and regulations. "The path to compliance is clear. It's [that] the firms, in some regard, have generally been operating outside of those parameters," Gensler said.

The SEC chairman's head is not, after all, centered on the crypto industry but on the merging technology brought about by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

"The much more transformative technology right now of our times is predictive data analytics and everything underlying artificial intelligence," Gensler said, noting that he looked forward to working with lawmakers on how those tools could be regulated.